Two Poems and an Essay on Living in Baltimore and Working with Women at the Baltimore City Jail

I. View of East Baltimore from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, 9^th Floor

November 30, 2004

construction crane

turns imperceptibly

holding taut the wrecking ball

poised

Johns Hopkins

waits for East Baltimore to crumble

when he is finished

only the prison & university

will be left standing

shoulder to shoulder

brick to brick

xxx

II. View of East Baltimore from the Public Defender’s Office, Baltimore City Detention Center

February 26, 2005

pigeon shifts outside the window

rustling a leaf stuck in the grate

no light comes through

pane’s painted over

know the noise by

flashing shadows

fluttering wings

the only natural light:

a crack in the opaque plastic

lining the stairwell on the southside

the view: a pile of concrete rubble, parked cars and barbed wire

the women duck down to see,

“what’s the weather like?”

third floor smells of jail food: greasy and acidic

one woman pauses during an interview

conspiratorially she says “don’t look now, but

there’s a mouse right underneath you. look at him go!”

another woman has so much pain it hurts to sit up

doctors said she had “a abnormal uterus”

wanted to take out a little piece and have a closer look

got arrested before her appointment

hasn’t told the guards yet

afraid they won’t believe her

“but why would I fake that?

I’ve bled five times this month

that’s never happened before.

I’m worried.

That’s not normal, is it?”

xxx

December 16, 2004

Where am I in this?

When I first got to Baltimore I had never seen anything like it. The segregation. The rows upon rows of abandoned houses. In San Francisco, property is too valuable to be left vacant. The whole city’s landscape has been turned over in the past eight or nine years since the dot-com boom. Newly constructed live/work lofts stand vacant because they are unaffordable, a gaudy new eyesore; not because they are abandoned or boarded up.

In Baltimore I saw for the first time the kinds of segregation I’d grown up hearing about. The dividing line between neighborhoods black and white: Greenmount Avenue. And that is not to say there is not segregation in San Francisco, because there is. If anything its “prosperity” has reduced the black population there from 16% to 8% in the past ten years. What were once thriving black neighborhoods are now being steadily coopted by white hipsters, bars and cafes. As a queer white girl I am by no means free from implication in the gentrification conspiracy. We queers are, after all, often the first “pioneers.”

And yet. I had never seen eight houses out of ten on a block abandoned before I came here. I had worked for years with heroin injectors doing outreach, needle exchange, overdose prevention. But I had never seen so much of the adult population strung out on dope in one small place. Never seen regular folks shopping at Safeway, nodding with shopping carts inside the store. The kinds of desperation I was used to I had assumed were the results of living in a city where housing is nearly impossible to come by if you’re poor and where the cost of living means there are around fifteen or twenty thousand people sleeping on the streets, under bridges, and in public parks every night. I had assumed that having a place to live, a squat, a roof of one’s own (not a homeless shelter, I know how unsafe those are), was the place from which to start making life changes. I’d seen it work for kids I knew. Get arrested. Go into a residential treatment program. Get a job, a house, a life. Or. Get SSI, get a SRO hotel room. Things start to stabilize. (Or they don’t and you end up back on the streets and start all over.)

To see so many people living here in “abandominiums” threw me off. To see so much poverty that it was clear no amount of housing could bring an equally stable life. The cause was clear: corporate divestment, manufacturing removal, suburban flight. No jobs. No money. Leaves a vacuum filled by street economy. It makes sense. I read about it in The Corner and got a better understanding of the city I’d just moved into. I thought hard about what it meant to be perceived as just another “white girl on a dirt bike,” except I was not buying dope on the corner, just chugging up Biddle St. heading to school for public health at Johns Hopkins.

xxx

On my first day at Hopkins there was a security briefing where students were warned not to walk alone at night, not to park their cars on the street, not to venture off campus or out of sight of the two hundred some security guards and police officers that patrolled the six block radius surrounding the hospital, nursing, medical and public health schools. The speech conjured up images of an ivory tower surrounded by fire breathing dragons and a moat with a drawbridge that was tightly closed. I contemplated throwing a Molotov cocktail at the podium. I wanted to ask the speaker who protects the people of East Baltimore from the police, and from interpersonal violence? But in a room of four hundred people, on the first day of school, I knew it wasn’t the time or place. I went up to the speaker afterwards and asked that he check the underlying racism in his language. Calling him on it helped me feel a little less crazy, but the reaction of a woman who overheard our conversation about how she never walks alone in East Baltimore served as a reminder that I was not in San Francisco anymore.

xxx

Since getting here and starting to grow accustomed to the dichotomous landscape of poverty and prosperity, of racial “disparity” (as systemic racism is so apolitically described in medical academia), I keep conjuring up this image from the film The Battle of Algiers. In it, this woman, driven to armed revolution by the oppression of her people, stands in a café, explosives in her purse, looking at the white (French) café goers, chatting away obliviously. She knows they are not responsible, directly. But, like the Afrikaners in South Africa who benefited from apartheid, like white middle class US citizens who benefit from privilege, they did not see that their comfort and ease came as a result of the exploitation of Algerian land and people. She looks around, feeling the weight of her decision, and, in service of greater revolutionary cause, orders a coke, plants her purse full of explosives beneath a stool at the counter, and leaves.

I keep thinking about what it means to be those café goers, and how much those benefiting from white privilege can be held responsible for the atrocities carried out in our service. How is it that the activist scenes here can be so segregated? How is it that everyone is not working around issues of race and fighting white supremacy/privilege, in a city that is majority African-American and so obviously in need of human resources? What is it that enables non-Black to fight for bike lanes, for “peace” globally, for abstract issues that we understand to have local implications (and they do) but which do not speak to, or generate from, the local community? What does it mean to ride critical mass down Greenmount Avenue, in festive Halloween costumes? To ride critical mass past the jail that we only enter in service or in 24 hour stints post-protest? Where is the dialogue--no, the action--around race in the mostly white activist community in Baltimore? How are our struggles not inextricably linked? How can I fight for my liberation and not others’?

How can “anarchist white boys from Towson” not see that everything they think they are fighting for is based on issues that effect first and foremost people of color in Baltimore City (prisons, capitalism, sexism, class-exploitation, police brutality, white supremacy)?

What is my role in this, as an anarchist queer Jewish white girl, studying at Hopkins on scholarship, there ostensibly to get some skills to bring back to the community, getting more disillusioned each day? What role do I play, riding the shuttle from Homewood campus to Monument St., a tourist in this town? I do my project in the jails, hoping that a needs assessment will help put some better services and policies in place to improve the lives of women, both in and out of jail. I raise my hand and spout revolutionary rhetoric every chance I can get. I get a reputation for being a Big Mouth. I know who my friends are. I make my opinions known. I vow not to remain in academia after this program. I check out what’s going on with activism in Baltimore, and try to contribute within the limits of my time and ability. I try to listen, make connections, and build bridges that will last after I am gone. I get off the bus and walk through the streets of Baltimore, alone.

April 30, 2015

post script: #BlackLivesMatter #Justice4FreddieGray